Bessel van der Kolk
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, is a clinician, researcher, and teacher best known for his work with PTSD. Kolk has been active in the mental health field since the 1970s and is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Body Keeps the Score, which has been translated into 35 languages, and of well over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
Gabor Maté
Gabor Maté M.D., C.M., is a Canadian physician (retired), public speaker and bestselling author, published internationally in multiple languages. His book on addiction, the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, is used as a text in many institutions of higher learning in Canada and the U.S. His most recent book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, to be published in over 30 languages on five continents, has been and continues to be a #1 Canadian bestseller and, as of March 26 was an 8 weeks a New York Times bestseller.
After two decades as a family doctor and palliative care director, for twelve years Gabor worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV, including at Vancouver Supervised Injection Site, North America’s first such facility. His other interests encompass childhood developmental issues, ADHD, mind/body health, trauma and parenting. He is in constant demand as a speaker internationally and has addressed judicial bodies in Canada, the U.S. and Australia on the links between trauma, addictions, and dysfunctional behaviors. He has worked with many Indigenous communities around these issues.
He has received an Outstanding Alumnus Award from Simon Fraser University and an Honorary Degree (Laws) from the University of Northern British Columbia. For his groundbreaking medical work and writings, he has been given the Order of Canada, and the Civic Merit award from his home city of Vancouver.
A film based on his work, The Wisdom of Trauma, has been viewed by over 10 million people internationally and has been translated into twenty languages. It is shown regularly in many institutions, including schools and prisons, in Canada, the U.S., and abroad. www.thewisdomoftrauma.com His therapeutic method, Compassionate Inquiry, has been, in the past three years, studied by over 3,000 health care providers in 80 countries.
Gabor is a speaker much in demand internationally on addiction, stress and mind/body health, child development, trauma, ADHD and other topics related to his five best selling books. He has been featured on some of the most popular podcasts, such as Joe Rogan, Tim Ferris, Jay Shetty, and others. His next book, co-written with his son Daniel, will be Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Adult Children and Their Parents, based on their popular workshop.
www.drgabormate.com
Tania Singer
Tania Singer is the head of the Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. She is founder and principal investigator of the ReSource project, a large-scale longitudinal study on the effects of mental training on brain plasticity, mental and physical wellbeing and prosocial behavior, co-financed by the European Research Council. She further holds a cooperation with Prof. Dennis Snower, the former president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, on the topic of Caring Economics, funded by the Institute of New Economic Thinking. They investigate how biology and psychology can inform new economic models and decision-making. In the context of her longtime membership at the Mind and Life Institute, she helped organize together with Matthieu Ricard two large-scale conferences with the Dalai Lama in 2010 in Zürich and in 2016 in Brussels. These two conferences were published in two books, "Caring Economics" and "Power and Care". Tania has further published her findings in more than 150 high-impact peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.
Richard Schwartz
Richard Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic. Grounded in systems thinking, Dr. Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves. He focused on the relationships among these parts and noticed that there were systemic patterns to the way they were organized across clients. He also found that when the clients’ parts felt safe and were allowed to relax, the clients would experience spontaneously the qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion that Dr. Schwartz came to call the Self. He found that when in that state of Self, clients would know how to heal their parts.
A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz has published many books and over fifty articles about IFS.
